Allen, whoever writes that

"roughly 17 percent of the growth in autism in California and Pennsylvania during the 1970s and 1980s was DUE TO the growth in cable television."

clearly does not understand cause and effect relationships (unless the study actually randomized children to TV-watching and non-TV-watching groups and controlled for all sorts of potentially relevant variables like SES, parenting, etc etc etc).

Also, operant conditioning is VERY different from "UNDERSTANDING cause and effect". A person (baby, dog, pigeon...) can alter their behavior in response to reinforcement in an operant conditioning paradigm without understanding cause and effect relationships, even without awareness of the reinforcement or conditioning itself.

Who would have known a suicide attempt makes you sexier? Sure, you're probably dealing with depression, guilt, despair, and hopelessness, blah blah blah--who cares?! You're hotter than you were before!

So for all those guys who in spite of being handsome, happy, funny, and talented, are not getting much action, here's Heather's advice: Add drama! Maybe a few cuts on the arms? Perhaps doing a little heroin, only if you make sure to show your bruises off. Anything self-destructive will do.

I wonder what else Heather finds sexy: beating up your girl, maybe? ooh, danger... so hot.

Terry, I don't think it's true that "the overwhelming majority of teenagers who get pregnant end up having abortions." I might be wrong, but the latest stats that I've seen (2002) showed only 29% of teen pregnancies ended in abortion, with 57% having the baby:

http://www.guttmacher.org/pubs/fb_ATSRH.html

W mass writes that you can tell if someone is faking amnesia through behavioral and neurophysiological tests. I guess what s/he's referring to is the fact that when someone has learned something (that is, when something is familiar to them), you can pick this up on an EEG. The process is more complex than it sounds, but basically if I ask you, for example, to learn a list of words or figures, and then I hook you up with sensors on your scalp and show you a series of many many items, some from the list you studied and some you have not seen before, your EEG waves show a different response when you're presented with a familiar vs. an unfamiliar item, considered "proof" that you have a memory for that item. This has been used, for example, in a few studies with patients who have been diagnosed with dissociative identity disorder (the disorder formerly known as multiple personality disorder), since in "true" DID one personality is supposed to be unaware of what the other personality did or learned (kind of an inter-personality amnesia).

It is very tricky to apply methods like this to clinical diagnosis, though. For one thing, even if, say, the EEG shows a response that indicates the allegedly amnestic patient is familiar with an item (for example, a picture of the house he grew in), you can always argue that even though the brain "recognizes" the item, the patient is not consciously aware of it. In other words, sure, the memory is still encoded somewhere in the brain, but you can not access it, or bring it to consciousness. Related to this, skin conductance responses have also been used to test familiarity with an item (think about the infamous polygraph for lie detection). For example, in patients with documented prosopagnosia, a disorder in which people lose the ability to recognize faces, if you show them familiar vs. unfamiliar faces they show an increase in skin conductance to the familiar faces, even though they cannot recognize them. These patients have a "true" impairment, a documented neural injury that makes them unable to recognize faces. But while heir body is responding to the familiar faces, (their body "knows"), they feel they don't. As Burton points out, we have no way of testing a person's conscious experience. We like to think that we know what our measures mean, but given their limitations, making inferences about what a person is experiencing based on a wiggle in their EEG or what brain area is lighting up is unwarranted and irresponsible.

My son's only 4 so I don't know whether teenage years will be worse, but: I felt disappointed when I experienced similar feelings to those Vicky describes. Going back to work soon (and liking it). Not wanting to ever be a stay-at-home mom. Enjoying my time alone. Being frustrated or (gulp) bored with moments in which I was supposed to be overcome with motherly whatever. But the biggest lesson I've learned is that it takes (some of us) a long time to become a mom, and that we get a little better at it each day. I don't mean to give anyone advice but I do think that when I accepted my feelings about being a mom --my complex, ambivalent, less than pregnancy-book-perfect feelings about being a mom-- things started going better. It has become easier and easier to give things up, my patience muscle is developing, my yearning for those things I can no longer have has quieted down. I'm happier every day. My friends ask, "Don't you miss when he was just a baby"? And the answer is absolutely not! As they grow it is SO much more fun. Seeing your child become a person, listening to their thoughts, doing things with them, is so much more rewarding as they grow that you love them more and more each day.

Whoever "frankly thinks you should stop your whining" is obviously entitled to their opinion, but I hope nobody listens to it. Of course it could always be worse. Of course those of us with healthy children should take time each day to give thanks. But while realizing all this keeps things in perspective, it doesn't make your feelings change overnight and telling yourself you "should" feel differently is not just useless, it's harmful. For some of us it takes time. And it is very hard. But we get there. One day you realize you don't wish you were on that train anymore.